[P2P-F] Twenty reasons why it's kicking off everywhere - Paul Mason

Sun Feb 6 08:06:15 CET 2011

very interesting, and I think he has uncovered one of the major social
dynamics,

an urelated remark, in my current blog series on social media and social
revolutions, I repeatedly come across the net delusion arguments

one of morozov's key arguments is that social media can and will be used for
social media and repression, so activists should be wary of social media

this is undoubtedly true, but there is a important counter-argument, hinted
here below as well: no social change can happen without the overcoming of
fear,

the courage of the first facebook appealers in tunisia and egypt is akin to
the one of the greensboro 4 who started the civil rights movement

if that is true, then this substantially weakens morozov's argument

On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 8:22 AM, Kevin Flanagan <kev.flanagan at gmail.com>wrote:

> Twenty reasons why it's kicking off everywhere - Paul Mason
>
>
> http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/paulmason/2011/02/twenty_reasons_why_its_kicking.html
>
> We've had revolution in Tunisia, Egypt's Mubarak is teetering; in
> Yemen, Jordan and Syria suddenly protests have appeared. In Ireland
> young techno-savvy professionals are agitating for a "Second
> Republic"; in France the youth from banlieues battled police on the
> streets to defend the retirement rights of 60-year olds; in Greece
> striking and rioting have become a national pastime. And in Britain
> we've had riots and student occupations that changed the political
> mood.
>
> What's going on? What's the wider social dynamic?
>
> My editors yesterday asked me put some bullet points down for a
> discussion on the programme that then didn't happen but I am throwing
> them into the mix here, on the basis of various conversations with
> academics who study this and also the participants themselves.
>
> At the heart of it all are young people, obviously; students;
> westernised; secularised. They use social media - as the mainstream
> media has now woken up to - but this obsession with reporting "they
> use twitter" is missing the point of what they use it for.
>
> In so far as there are common threads to be found in these different
> situation, here's 20 things I have spotted:
>
> 1. At the heart if it all is a new sociological type: the graduate
> with no future
>
> 2. ...with access to social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and eg
> Yfrog so they can express themselves in a variety of situations
> ranging from parliamentary democracy to tyrrany.
>
> 3. Therefore truth moves faster than lies, and propaganda becomes
> flammable.
>
> 4. They are not prone to traditional and endemic ideologies:
> Labourism, Islamism, Fianna Fail Catholicism etc... in fact hermetic
> ideologies of all forms are rejected.
>
> 5. Women very numerous as the backbone of movements. After twenty
> years of modernised labour markets and higher-education access the
> "archetypal" protest leader, organizer, facilitator, spokesperson now
> is an educated young woman.
>
> 6. Horizontalism has become endemic because technology makes it easy:
> it kills vertical hierarchies spontaneously, whereas before - and the
> quintessential experience of the 20th century - was the killing of
> dissent within movements, the channeling of movements and their
> bureaucratisaton.
>
> 7. Memes: "A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas symbols
> or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another
> through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable
> phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural
> analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to
> selective pressures." (Wikipedia) - so what happens is that ideas
> arise, are very quickly "market tested" and either take off, bubble
> under, insinuate themselves or if they are deemed no good they
> disappear. Ideas self-replicate like genes. Prior to the internet this
> theory (see Richard Dawkins, 1976) seemed an over-statement but you
> can now clearly trace the evolution of memes.
>
> 8. They all seem to know each other: not only is the network more
> powerful than the hierarchy - but the ad-hoc network has become easier
> to form. So if you "follow" somebody from the UCL occupation on
> Twitter, as I have done, you can easily run into a radical blogger
> from Egypt, or a lecturer in peaceful resistance in California who
> mainly does work on Burma so then there are the Burmese tweets to
> follow. During the early 20th century people would ride hanging on the
> undersides of train carriages across borders just to make links like
> these.
>
> 9. The specifics of economic failure: the rise of mass access to
> university-level education is a given. Maybe soon even 50% in higher
> education will be not enough. In most of the world this is being
> funded by personal indebtedess - so people are making a rational
> judgement to go into debt so they will be better paid later. However
> the prospect of ten years of fiscal retrenchment in some countries
> means they now know they will be poorer than their parents. And the
> effect has been like throwing a light switch; the prosperity story is
> replaced with the doom story, even if for individuals reality will be
> more complex, and not as bad as they expect.
>
> 10.This evaporation of a promise is compounded in the more repressive
> societies and emerging markets because - even where you get rapid
> economic growth - it cannot absorb the demographic bulge of young
> people fast enough to deliver rising living standards for enough of
> them.
>
> 11.To amplify: I can't find the quote but one of the historians of the
> French Revolution of 1789 wrote that it was not the product of poor
> people but of poor lawyers. You can have political/economic setups
> that disappoint the poor for generations - but if lawyers, teachers
> and doctors are sitting in their garrets freezing and starving you get
> revolution. Now, in their garrets, they have a laptop and broadband
> connection.
>
> 12.The weakness of organised labour means there's a changed
> relationship between the radicalized middle class, the poor and the
> organised workforce. The world looks more like 19th century Paris -
> heavy predomination of the "progressive" intelligentsia, intermixing
> with the slum-dwellers at numerous social interfaces (cabarets in the
> 19C, raves now); huge social fear of the excluded poor but also many
> rags to riches stories celebrated in the media (Fifty Cent etc);
> meanwhile the solidaristic culture and respectability of organized
> labour is still there but, as in Egypt, they find themselves a "stage
> army" to be marched on and off the scene of history.
>
> 13.This leads to a loss of fear among the young radicals of any
> movement: they can pick and choose; there is no confrontation they
> can't retreat from. They can "have a day off" from protesting,
> occupying: whereas twith he old working-class based movements, their
> place in the ranks of battle was determined and they couldn't retreat
> once things started. You couldn't "have a day off" from the miners'
> strike if you lived in a pit village.
>
> 14.In addition to a day off, you can "mix and match": I have met
> people who do community organizing one day, and the next are on a
> flotilla to Gaza; then they pop up working for a think tank on
> sustainable energy; then they're writing a book about something
> completely different. I was astonished to find people I had
> interviewed inside the UCL occupation blogging from Tahrir Square this
> week.
>
> 15. People just know more than they used to. Dictatorships rely not
> just on the suppression of news but on the suppression of narratives
> and truth. More or less everything you need to know to make sense of
> the world is available as freely downloadable content on the internet:
> and it's not pre-digested for you by your teachers, parents, priests,
> imams. For example there are huge numbers of facts available to me now
> about the subjects I studied at university that were not known when I
> was there in the 1980s. Then whole academic terms would be spent
> disputing basic facts, or trying to research them. Now that is still
> true but the plane of reasoning can be more complex because people
> have an instant reference source for the undisputed premises of
> arguments. It's as if physics has been replaced by quantum physics,
> but in every discipline.
>
> 16.There is no Cold War, and the War on Terror is not as effective as
> the Cold War was in solidifying elites against change. Egypt is
> proving to be a worked example of this: though it is highly likely
> things will spiral out of control, post Mubarak - as in all the colour
> revolutons - the dire warnings of the US right that this will lead to
> Islamism are a "meme" that has not taken off. In fact you could make
> an interesting study of how the meme starts, blossoms and fades away
> over the space of 12 days. To be clear: I am not saying they are wrong
> - only that the fear of an Islamist takeover in Egypt has not been
> strong enough to swing the US presidency or the media behind Mubarak.
>
> 17. It is - with international pressure and some powerful NGOs -
> possible to bring down a repressive government without having to spend
> years in the jungle as a guerilla, or years in the urban underground:
> instead the oppositional youth - both in the west in repressive
> regimes like Tunisia/Egypt, and above all in China - live in a virtual
> undergrowth online and through digital comms networks. The internet is
> not key here - it is for example the things people swap by text
> message, the music they swap with each other etc: the hidden meanings
> in graffiti, street art etc which those in authority fail to spot.
>
> 18. People have a better understanding of power. The activists have
> read their Chomsky and their Hardt-Negri, but the ideas therein have
> become mimetic: young people believe the issues are no longer class
> and economics but simply power: they are clever to the point of
> expertise in knowing how to mess up hierarchies and see the various
> "revolutions" in their own lives as part of an "exodus" from
> oppression, not - as previous generations did - as a "diversion into
> the personal". While Foucault could tell Gilles Deleuze: "We had to
> wait until the nineteenth century before we began to understand the
> nature of exploitation, and to this day, we have yet to fully
> comprehend the nature of power",- that's probably changed.
>
> 19. As the algebraic sum of all these factors it feels like the
> protest "meme" that is sweeping the world - if that premise is indeed
> true - is profoundly less radical on economics than the one that swept
> the world in the 1910s and 1920s; they don't seek a total overturn:
> they seek a moderation of excesses. However on politics the common
> theme is the dissolution of centralized power and the demand for
> "autonomy" and personal freedom in addition to formal democracy and an
> end to corrupt, family based power-elites.
>
> 20. Technology has - in many ways, from the contraceptive pill to the
> iPod, the blog and the CCTV camera - expanded the space and power of
> the individual.
>
> Some complications....
>
> a) all of the above are generalisations: and have to be read as such.
>
> b) are these methods replicable by their opponents? Clearly up to a
> point they are. So the assumption in the global progressive movement
> that their values are aligned with that of the networked world may be
> wrong. Also we have yet to see what happens to all this social
> networking if a state ever seriously pulls the plug on the technology:
> switches the mobile network off, censors the internet, cyber-attacks
> the protesters.
>
> c) China is the laboratory here, where the Internet Police are paid to
> go online and foment pro-government "memes" to counteract the
> oppositional ones. The Egyptian leftist blogger Arabawy.org says on
> his website that : "in a dictatorship, independent journalism by
> default becomes a form of activism, and the spread of information is
> essentially an act of agitation." But independent journalism is
> suppressed in many parts of the world.
>
> d) what happens to this new, fluffy global zeitgeist when it runs up
> against the old-style hierarchical dictatorship in a death match,
> where the latter has about 300 Abrams tanks? We may be about to find
> out.
>
> e) - and this one is troubling for mainstream politics: are we
> creating a complete disconnect between the values and language of the
> state and those of the educated young? Egypt is a classic example - if
> you hear the NDP officials there is a time-warped aspect to their
> language compared to that of young doctors and lawyers on the Square.
> But there are also examples in the UK: much of the political discourse
> - on both sides of the House of Commons - is treated by many young
> people as a barely intelligible "noise" - and this goes wider than
> just the protesters.
>
> (For example: I'm finding it common among non-politicos these days
> that whenever you mention the "Big Society" there's a shrug and a
> suppressed laugh - yet if you move into the warren of thinktanks
> around Westminster, it's treated deadly seriously. Dissing the Big
> Society has quickly become a "meme" that crosses political tribal
> boundaries under the Coalition, yet most professional politicians are
> deaf to "memes" as the youth are to the contents of Hansard.)
>
> That's it - as I say, these are just my thoughts on it all and not
> researched other than through experience: there are probably whole PhD
> theses about some of this so feel free to hit the comments.
>
> Likewise if you think it is all balderdash, and if you are over 40 you
> may, vent your analog-era spleen below.
>
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